Mumlightenment: How to get your baby to sleep

If there's one question most mothers want answers to it's this: how can I get a day off? While mothers may bask in the glow of pregnancy and joy at meeting their child, most fail to realise they have signed up for an 18-hour day and 6-hours a night of being on call! A sleeping baby is the blessing that can get us through the tougher moments. Babies that sleep well tend to eat better, remain more settled, and have mothers that aren't walking around with toothpicks propping open their eyelids. But how do you get a baby to sleep?
As a mother blessed with two babies that failed to sleep the way I would have liked them to, I worked out a couple of tricks to get me through.
Sleep tip #1: Sleep is only a matter of perspective
Those mothers that pretend their babies sleep for 12 hours a night are possibly lying to you. Most babies will wake at some point, but many mothers are happy to quickly settle or feed their baby and do not register this as "not sleeping". Other mothers are entirely sleep greedy and want their old life where 8 hours sleep was a minimum requirement to function, so therefore resent any sleep interruptions.
Sleep tip #2: Calm, rested mothers are better at getting babies to sleep
Once you have become the kind of mother desperate for sleep, it's as though the baby has an inbuilt sensor to stay awake, become unsettled and generally create a vicious cycle of even less sleep. Accept this and move on to finding solutions. You're not allowed to beat yourself up. You are not to feel like a failure. You are to get on with it.
Sleep tip #3: Responsive settling is the new sleep cure
Tresillian is a health service that is nothing short of brilliant. They allow mums to stay for a day or five-nights to cure sleep issues and get family life back on track. Their  trick is to teach mums how to settle their babies back to sleep to develop healthy sleep patterns. Read their tricks for getting babies to sleep here. To find out about teaching toddlers to sleep, read here.

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